Three
Penn faculty membersincluding one who is also an alumnahave been
honored with major literary prizes this spring.

In early April, History Professor Steven Hahn received the Pulitzer
Prize for A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in
the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration. Published
by Harvard University Press, the book traces the development of black
politics in the 19th century and tells how black political struggles
shaped the South and the nation through slavery and the Civil War,
Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. Hahn reveals that
blacks were far more knowledgeable about local and national politics
during slavery than generally recognized, and far more active and
assertive in pursuing their social and political goals in the post-Civil
War era. Publishers Weekly called the book original and
deeply informed, and noted that it continues the ongoing
demolition of the myth of the submissive slave cowering before his
master and the ignorant freedman waiting passively for his 40
acres and a mule to fall from the sky.

In March, when the National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced
in New York, Paul Hendrickson, a longtime feature writer for The
Washington Post who teaches a popular non-fiction writing course
at Penn, took home the non-fiction award for Sons of Mississippi,
his searching examination of racial attitudes across generations,
published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf last year and this year
in a Vintage paperback. Using a 1962 photograph that appeared in Life
magazine depicting seven local sheriffs in the days before Mississippi
State University was forcibly integrated by James Meredith as a starting
point, Hendrickson traces the lives of the men and their families
in the years since to ask, Where did the hatred and the sorrow go
that flowed out of that moment How did a gene of intolerance and
racial fear mutate as it passed sinuously through time and the family
bloodstream? How has that gene reshaped itself, and possibly for the
better?

And poet-critic Susan Stewart Gr78, the Regan Professor of English
at Penn and a MacArthur Fellow, received the National Book Critics
Circles poetry award for Columbarium, published by the
University of Chicago Press, which The Boston Review praised
as deeply disturbing poems of original and unforgettable craft.
The collection, Stewarts first since The Forest in 1995,is modeled on the 17th century practice of century forms (books
of 100 pages) and is described on the book jacket as both a
memorial to the dead and a testament to life.J.P.